TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy Drama, Black Comedy, Ensemble Film, Satire, Coming-of-Age, Tragi-Comedy
Key Collaborators: Kevin Messman (Editor), Ted Hope (Producer), Derrick Tseng (Producer), Christine Vachon (Producer), Alan Oxman (Editor), Nathan Larson (Composer), Selma Blair (Leading Actress), Ed Lachman (Cinematographer)

"In people like Solondz, LaBute, and Terry Zwigoff we have a generation (more or less) that simply won’t swallow the white lies anymore. It’s up to us, and the system, whether we subvert it by calling it black humor." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"The films of Todd Solondz are, in a word, polarizing. Some reject what are perceived to be his misanthropic tendencies while others praise his unflinching ability to present the world, warts and all." - Harvard Film Archive, 2005

"Everybody's either a bully or a weakling, and the weaklings will gladly become bullies if given half the chance: such is the human strain as seen through the microscope of Todd Solondz, cinema's bard of the New jersey suburbs." - Jessica Winter (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"He could almost be the odd cousin of Woody Allen. A middle aged neurotic Jewish intellectual arthouse film director, consumed by life's existential questions. But rather than answering them with pretty plots and cute characters, Solondz prefers to approach film through his uniquely off-kilter view of the world and distinctive dark humour." - 52 Insights, 2016

"Todd Solondz's work as a film-maker to date has sparked much controversy and conflicting critical opinion for its alleged 'perversity' and 'cynicism'. Effectively foregrounding the marginalised experiences of isolated social outcasts, his films are relentlessly honest and rarely gratuitous, although the fine line between satire and misanthropy is becoming increasingly blurred." - Hannah Patterson (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)

"Every auteur needs a signature font, don't they? Woody Allen has Windsor, Wes Anderson claimed Futura. Todd Solondz, a director once hailed as "the New Jersey poet of bleakness and despair," has a swirly baroque one that I don't know the name of. But it's not his only filmic fingerprint. The 56-year-old filmmaker makes strange comedies that examine the sordid underbelly of American suburbia and spotlight the socially inept weirdos who live there. Watching films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness is like entering a town whose drinking water, you suspect, has been spiked with a misery-inducing drug." - Oliver Lunn (i-D, 2016)

"Sometimes I've been accused of a certain kind of misanthropy, but I don't think that's fair or accurate. I think it's only by accepting and embracing people for all their flaws and foibles that one can, in fact, really embrace all of who we are." - Todd Solondz (Boston Herald, 1998)